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User blog:Deadcoder/Deadcoder's Reviews: Aelita
This review is being done at the request of somebody I met on Facebook. I don't know why he requested this episode, but I'm reviewing it anyway. Aelita has a title that is so half-assed, it should have been the title of Canine Conundrum. In the name of not judging a book by its cover, I won't hold the terrible title against this episode. As per usual, this episode will be evaluated on a scale of 0-10, with 10 being amazing, 0 being Melanie Tran's acting, and coincidentally, Sarah Palin's IQ. =The Review= "Aelita" starts off with a title card, reminding us of the incineration of the Forest Sector. I will discuss this matter in a later review, perhaps when I hit X.A.N.A. 2.0, for reasons that only make sense in my head. We get a cut to the cliche of sepia, "damn you iMovie", with Aelita running in the sewers of France to the factory. He explains that he's taking her to a place where they'll be safe, only to virtualize her onto Lyoko instead, in the Forest Sector. She calls out for her father, only to hear whale noises. For some reason, Franz Hopper is virtualized as a set of sentient disco balls, rather than as a person, like everyone else. He explains that the process doesn't work on him yet, while Aelita fondles one of his balls. Wow, incestual subtext? No wonder Aelita doesn't want to remember this part of her childhood. The kankrelats are offended by this, and come to shoot Franz for this depravity, and Aelita for some reason as well. In a rare moment of sanity, Aelita runs away from the craziest dirty old man ever and monsters, and towards the safety of a long shaft. Showing a rare moment of competence from the Kadic Faculty, a teacher wakes her up. The teacher explains the concept of Ragnarok, complete with a well translated, but still horrible, pun from Odd. The teacher tells Odd to get out for a horrible pun, again a rare justified act from one of the teachers. Later, near the benches, we get a chain of mediocre to bad dialog, with everyone eventually telling Odd that his feet smell like a gas station bathroom where the toilet is overflowing and everyone who has been in there has eaten Arbys. Odd keeps focusing on this issue, while the viewer doesn't give a crap. I mean really, people watch this show for a captivating story, gorgeous animation, and fanservice; not to listen to Odd bitch about a biochemical problem that's common to many people, "and to the infrequently bathed French in particular". This obnoxious B plot results in minus one point, despite the fact that Jeremie's amputation joke is actually a delightful piece of black comedy. Odd goes to see Yolanda, and even she knows about the terrible smell that isn't this part of the script. She talks to him while she plays with what appears to be a waterballoon filled with Oreo cream filling. Most fans don't notice this, but season 3 got a radical upgrade for the 2d animation, under the regime of Marie-Line Landerwyn. She reveals the solution to this part of the plot, so we can kill it before it infects the rest of the episode. We get another sepia flashback, complete with the Bass Tuba music of creepy flashback! In the tower, Aelita is approached by Franz, as he explains that he needs to make peace with XANA, a multi-agent program he made that's achieved self-awareness, and wants to kill them like a fox executive on a scifi show. He tells her not to leave the tower, as she calls out for him. In a surprisingly good transition "surprising meaning that it works equally well in PAL and NTSC", to the cafeteria, Odd arrives with Aelita coming out of her flashbacks. Odd shows off the animation while Aelita asks Jeremie if it's possible her father is alive. She reasons that it's possible that he's still alive and materializable, with Jeremie dismissing it as absurd ramblings. This exhibits a rare trope in fiction, two characters being genre savy, and coming to different conclusions. Jeremie, being a dick to his girlfriend by ignoring her pain, says that he checked Lyoko for him with no results, and is more concerned with fighting xana and setting up season 4; but kills any highground by telling Aelita that she should do the same. Seeing her boyfriend acting like her father's death should mean nothing to her, Aelita encounters the Aelita Options! :0. Act suicidal and/or crazy. :1. Attack it with a long single note of angry music. :2. Have an argument with it. :3. Use Energy Fields. Since Jeremie is being a dick right now, 2 is the easiest one, so 2 it is! She actually gives Jeremie the kind of reaction that I think she should have given to Franz, telling him "YOU THINK THIS IS EASY?! YOU DIDN'T SPEND 10 YEARS OF YOUR LIFE AS SOME SORT OF COMPUTER SOFTWARE!" She wishes that she never recovered her memories. My readers know I have two theories about Aelita: that she's criminally insane and suicidal; and that the reason she is criminally insane and suicidal is because of exposure to absurd mental trauma. I like this scene because it's nice to see a scene where the writers looked at the 20 year car accident that is Aelita's life. Back in the sepia flashback, Aelita starts to go insane from loneliness and boredom in the tower, and leaves. At the same time, we see her running to what kind of looks like a taller version of the hermitage. Franz explains the end of season 2 to Aelita, and that XANA had gotten too powerful and was a threat to all of humanity, "And a supercomputer that can turn time into pasta wasn't a threat? What is wrong with you?!" He tells her that he's shutting down the supercomputer, asking her not to forget him. Sadly, he shuts down the machine, sentencing him and his daughter to a digital purgatory, only for his last request to be unfulfilled. We see Aeltia crying in her room in the Hermitage, only for Odd to find her. She opens up to him about how she feels about her past. He explains that Jeremie genuinely cares about her, and he's just undiplomatic and socially dense. Aelita explains that she likes him too, but she wishes that he would be more understanding of why she cares so much about him, that for all is faults, he's all that she has left of her old life. The disturbing part about this scene is that it requires no suspension of disbelief. Having dated a person with Asperger's syndrome, having it myself, and had to be there for a friend whose relationship is having issues; I have been in Odd, Aelita, and Jeremie's places. This is an intense scene; and despite the french technology that actually works, this scene is one of the most realistic things in the season. Plus one point is given to Bruno Regeste, for making a scene that is a disturbingly realistic look at the dropped priceless vase that is love. Aelita has a slightly bipolar moment, opting to go to Lyoko to look for her father. Odd points out that this might be a bad idea, but she persuades him. Well, with that scene that makes me want to lie in bed for a week and miss classes out of depression out of the way, Jeremie asks Ulrich if he was an ass to Aelita. Ulrich responds yes. We get a scene of Jim being an obnoxious unaware pain in the ass to both the other characters and the audience. The episode starts taking an emotional upturn with the season 2 virtualization music. Yumi and William enter a test that William is doomed to fail. We get a virtualization shot that manages to be better than most. We get a POV shot, and amazingly, the shot of them getting in the scanners is actually new animation. Jeremie notices an activated tower with some half assed voice acting. They start screaming at eachother in the library about a recipe that hopefully is fake. We find out that it's unfortunately real, and invented by Odd, with the season 1 virtualization music. We get a phone tree scene, while Jeremie wonders if Aeltia is still mad at him as he fails to contact her. Odd and Aelita arrive at the transport orb just in time. Yumi sprints to the Factory, and we get another painful scene about Odd's feet. Yumi finally shows up, while Jeremie and Ulrich fail to contact Aelita and Odd. Even they realize how stupid the Odd's feet plot is. Jeremie shoves them into the Mountain sector surrounded by monsters. He sends them their vehicles, and they flee. Over in sector 5, Odd and Aelita find the key, and Aelita devirtualizes a creeper with an energy field, despite missing it completely. The creepers are calling out more than usual, and coordinating a lot more. Aelita notices this, and wonders if they were surprised to see them. They take out some creepers, and trigger the key, alerting Jeremie to their presence. He gets pissed off at them "Hey Jeremie, maybe you could remember that you said you were going to apologize?" Aelita gets depressed, and decides to cancel their side mission; with Jeremie ordering them like dogs. Odd and Aelita notice that the core is under attack, and Jeremie notices, never mind that he used to be able to detect that on his own. Back in the Mountain Sector, Yumi and Ulrich take out some bloks, with a blok using the ring lasers that never work. Odd makes poorly translated dialog. Yumi points out that XANA outsmarted them by using the tower as a diversion. Jeremie points out that Odd and Aelita doing a sidequest was what foiled his plan. Jeremie makes a crappily written homoerotic remark. In sector 5, Odd is having trouble with the mantas, and is devirtualized while he says he can make better jokes. Aelita then takes out a Manta. In Carthage, Yumi and Ulrich arrive as fast as the recycled footage will take them. Aelita makes it into the Core chamber, and takes out several monsters. They eliminate the monsters. Jeremie reminds Aelita that they have a tower to deactivate, but says that if she wants to they could stop at a terminal first for data. Back in the dorms, Ulrich and Kiwi are horrified by the smell of Odd's foot cream, with it being worse than Odd's feet. Jeremie sifts through the data, and they find a fragment of a DNA code sequence that looks like Franz's. Aelita concludes that he may still be alive. Review Summary This episode had numerous plotholes. For starters, Xana didn't do anything with the activated tower at all. Say what you want about evolution, at least the attacks actually did something, even if it was just lottery fraud or touching the warriors inappropriately. Also, earlier in this season, Jeremie was able to detect attacks on the core with little effort, yet in this episode, it was sheer chance that they noticed. Also, Jeremie alternates between trying to be nice to Aelita and being a jackass. I'm no Oddlita shipper, but at least Odd treated her like an actual person with legitimate issues the majority of the episode. The Bplot with Odd's feet was just stupid and annoying. However, Aelita has good parts. The scene in the hermitage is, in my opinion, worthy of serious awards. It was nice to see that Aelita is still dealing with what happened to her father. The flashbacks were useful, even though we already had a large chunk of what happened. Sadly, they weren't enough to redeem this episode. I want to love this episode and have it among the top 10, but sadly, it just didn't succeed. Overall rating: 4/10. The episode could have been a crowning moment for Aelita as a character, but it was incapacitated by a story that had flaws and irritation. To pick out an example of how this could have been done better, the un-plot of Odd's feet could have been cut out entirely. Instead, they could have had an actual attack, and just make it half-assed, using some energy to take out some of the monitoring programs around the core. This could have been done entirely with recycled footage. We got this instead. Category:Blog posts Category:Aelita (episode)